R onell, A vital

Abstract

Avital Ronell was born in Prague in 1952. Her parents were Israeli diplomats of German‐Jewish descent who settled in New York having first returned to Israel, where Ronell spent her early childhood. She studied with Jacob Taubes at the Hermeneutic Institute of Berlin, earned her doctoral degree at Princeton in the late 1970s, and subsequently worked in Paris with Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida. She was professor of comparative literature and theory at the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to New York to take up a chair in German and comparative literature at New York University, where for several years she taught a seminar alongside Derrida, whose texts she has helped to translate. Alongside her position at NYU, Ronell also holds the Jacques Derrida Chair at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Ronell's critical encounters with Goethe, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, and Freud – and also Kathy Acker and George Bush – have lead to compelling texts on such disparate subjects as AIDS, crack, stupidity, trauma, haunting, pornography, war, and technology. Once a performance artist, she is also credited as having established addiction studies in the US.